Much ado was made about “One Today,” Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem for president Barack Obama, but also worth checking out is Paul Muldoon’s “For Barack Obama: His Second Inauguration.”
Presidential Poetry
Books, Faced
It’s not all Kindles and ebooks and the death of print media out there: the book-themed social media site Goodreads is exploding in popularity, perhaps solving the “discoverability” problem of digital reading.
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Questions of Travel
Elisa Wouk Almino writes for Hyperallergic about her search for a home in Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry of estrangement. As she explains it, “Over time, I’ve found that home is not always attached to place.” Pair with this meditation on Bishop’s poetry.
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Hansel and Gaiman
Neil Gaiman’s newest graphic novel isn’t even out yet, but it already has a movie deal. His update on the Brothers Grimm fairytale Hansel and Gretel with illustrations by Lorenzo Mattotti comes out on October 28, and Juliet Blake is developing a live action version. Hopefully, it’s better than Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.
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The Wounded Women
“Women writers who kill themselves—are somehow perpetually on display, or even on trial. They must answer for their art and their final act against the world and their husbands and children, born and unborn,” Kevin Kanarek said in a Rumpus interview about his mother, Pamela Moore. Her 1956 novel, Chocolates For Breakfast, has just been reissued. Pair with: Alison Balaskovits’ post on VICE‘s infamous fashion editorial on the suicides of famous women writers.
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Magical Journalism
“But where Smiley condescended, others were enthralled. Salmon Rushdie waxed lyrical, John Updike found it ‘stunning,’ Susan Sontag hosted him at dinner parties. Gabriel Garcia Marquez dubbed him, simply, ‘the Master’ – high praise from the founder of magical realism, but Kapuściński seemed to one-up Garcia Marquez by injecting magic into real politics, and elucidating thereby the human tension and bewilderment connected to power that traditional journalism left hidden.” Ryszard Kapuściński: novelist? Journalist? Or something else entirely?
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